Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann
Between Worlds
ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum
Through 12 september 2021
ELISABETH JERICHAU-BAUMAN
En såret dansk kriger, 1865
Statens Museum for Kunst
ELISABETH JERICHAU-BAUMAN
En egyptisk fellahkvinde med sit barn, 1872
Statens Museum for Kunst
The exhibition showcases about 100 paintings by the Danish-Polish artist ELISABETH JERICHAU-BAUMAN (1818–1881), representing a different and lesser-known side of the 19th-century Danish art scene.
- It has long been a desire of ours to set up an exhibition devoted to Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann at ARoS, and we are now proud to announce the most extensive presentation of her works to date. She was a unique voice in 19th-century Denmark and a forceful woman who, throughout her career, fought for her own personal emancipation – both as an artist and as an individual. Now we are giving her the place she deserves, says Erlend G. Høyersten, museum director, ARoS.
A NEW LOOK AT THE DANISH GOLDEN AGE
In the middle of the 19th century it was artists such as C.W. Eckersberg and a number of leading art historians who wrote the history of the Danish Golden Age. The period after the First Schleswig War was marked by strong national feeling, and the Danish art scene was dominated by subject matter dealing with the Danish people, the Danish landscape and the national past. This was the reality that Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann experienced when she came to Denmark in 1849. Because of her background at the art academy in Düsseldorf, she was mistaken for a German on her arrival, which in those years, from a pro-Danish point of view, was practically the worst kind of category to be placed in.
– Jerichau-Baumann is a cosmopolitan when compared to Danish artistic life in general. In Jerichau-Baumann's paintings we see drama and emotion, which runs contrary to the work of contemporary Danish Golden Age painters. The same is true of her use of colour. Jerichau-Baumann works within a range of brownish shades that are characteristic of the contemporary Central European trend, as opposed to the Danish use of colour, which is light and blond. She arrives in a Denmark strongly marked by nationalism, and here, because of her international style, she hits a brick wall, says Jakob Vengberg Sevel, curator, ARoS.
ELISABETH JERICHAU-BAUMAN
Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann was born in 1818 in Warsaw to a Polish mother and a German father. She trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf (1838 to 1844) after which she travelled to Rome where she met the Danish artist Jens Adolf Jerichau. They married and subsequently moved to Denmark, where they had nine children. In the period 1858 to 1871 Jerichau-Baumann travelled back and forth between Copenhagen and London where, for example, she did work for the British royal family. From 1869 to 1870 she made her first long voyage to the Orient (the Middle East and North Africa), and her travels became a way of discovering the world and promoting herself. Thanks to her foreign contacts and European perspective, Jerichau-Baumann was one of the very few Danish painters to portray the Orient and, as a woman, she was given exceptional access to harems which she could thus reproduce from her own observations. In addition, she was a very successful portrait painter of the aristocracy. Stylistically, she was oriented towards Europe and represented the European trends which, at the time, were thin on the ground in the Danish art world.
Curator-in-charge: Jakob Vengberg Sevel, curator, ARoS.
ARoS AARHUS KUNSTMUSEUM
Aros Allé 2, 8000 Aarhus C
